YORK, Pa. — A Pennsylvania man mistakenly threw $1.25 million worth of winning lottery tickets in the trash.
The guy, it goes without saying, was pretty upset.
"Wouldn't you be," said Wendy Hinton, who works at Zhou Grocery on South Queen Street in York.
On March 13, 2013, she sold 25 Quinto tickets — numbers 4-3-4-1-8 — to one of her regular customers, a man who, at the time, lived a couple of blocks from the corner store. She remembered because he played the same numbers every day — their significance, not known — and always bought a bunch of tickets with the same numbers — sometimes 20, other times 25 — among his daily lottery purchases that totaled about $100 a day.
Shortly after the drawing, she said, the man checked the numbers, but must have misread them and threw the tickets in the trash.
The 25 tickets were worth $50,000 each — $1.25 million total.
"He was mad," Hinton said of the day he found out that he threw away more than a million dollars. "He was so mad he played $400 that day."
It had been a mystery what happened to the tickets. The Pennsylvania Lottery put out a news release back in February, warning whoever held the tickets that they had until March 13 to cash them in, figuring that the person may have tucked them away in a kitchen junk drawer or had them in a wallet or pocketbook and hadn't bothered to check them.
The truth was slightly different.
"Oh, no," lottery spokeswoman Lauren Bottaro said. "Wow."
Bottaro said the lottery hates for tickets to go unclaimed and said this instance emphasizes the importance of players checking their tickets.
The $1.25 million jackpot will now remain in the state Lottery Fund.
Lottery players are usually pretty diligent about checking their tickets. Bottaro said Unclaimed tickets are very rare, composing maybe 1 percent of the number of tickets sold in the state.
"We do what we can" to notify winners, Bottaro said. "But sometimes, it's just not enough."
Dumb...
I have the hardest time, trying to understand people who go out of their way to buy lottery tickets and not check them. I have seen where the numbers have been posted on the television or computer sites wrong or late, but the numbers are soon corrected.
Hold on to your tickets for at the least, a couple of days and RECHECK THEM!!!
$100 in 1 day on tickets.......$400 in 1 day...... dont you have bills to pay ? lol
Poor guy. That's so unfortunate. No need to dance on this guy's grave.
Hmmm...I wonder if he checked the tickets with one of those ticket scanners, and it said, "Sorry, not a winner..." Those things have been known to give false negatives.
Just goes to show, always KNOW your numbers, and check and re-check if you are even close to dealing with a large amount.
Funny the clerk knew the numbers all this time but never clicked tell him?
He must have been so use to losing that he felt when his numbers came up, that just couldn't be right.
Speechless. I feel sorry for that guy.
What a shame to read this story. A lesson for all of us.
Ding Cuckoo,
Eastern PA LOL
what did he say? I couldn't understand it.
Yup, my worst fear. A nightmare.
You really cannot feel sorry for a man who doesn't check his tickets. Miss Fortune sure knows who to pay a visit to.
PA Lottery Quinto Evening Winning Lottery Numbers!
Evening Drawing
03/13/13
Winning Numbers: 4 3 4 1 8
$1 Straight bet pays $50,000.00
$1 Boxed bet pays $850.00
25 winners of $50,000
64 winners for a total of $1,277,300.00
nice to know your have company eh , DP1
I would have a hard time looking at myself in the mirror if I basically threw away that much money.